Vincent's Kiss

Vincent’s Kiss

I was thirteen the first time I got kissed. I mean by someone other than family. It was early spring – the end of March or early April, I believe. The day was warm for spring, but you could still feel a little chill in the wind, especially in the early evening. I was sitting on the porch swing with my best friend Vincent. He was thirteen also but a few months older. We were gently swinging together on one of those wooden-slatted swings hanging from an A-frame on his backyard patio. We were just talking and laughing about old Sister Mary Jude at our school – St. Thomas – and complaining about too much homework. “I kinda like her,” Vincent said, and I just rolled my eyes. “She’s weird,” was always my response. Vincent rolled his eyes. “That’s only because she wouldn’t give you an ‘A’.” Amid other topics of discussion – baseball, favorite TV shows, and, of course, girls (not always flattering) – there was the usual question about what we wanted to do before we got called in for supper. Vincent shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and said: “I don’t know. What do you want to do” followed by another shrug and “I don’t know” from me.

The delightful smell of homemade spaghetti sauce gently eased out the kitchen window located just above our heads. “Spaghetti,” I said, “must be Tuesday.”

Yeah,” Vincent replied looking out towards the back yard where we would certainly play many whiffleball games during the upcoming summer. “Always Tuesday.”

The rattling of dinner plates and tinkling of forks and knives announced that the table was being set. We didn’t even have to look to know that Vincent’s mother was leaning over the kitchen sink to get closer to the window screen and announce the supper countdown:

“Ten minutes, Vincent, and don’t dawdle!”

“Well, I guess I better go,” I said. “My mom is going to be calling in a minute, too.”

And that’s when it happened.

Vincent was looking at me – like staring – like he sometimes did when we were talking. He looked down at his hands that were doing nervous things like rubbing them together like you do when you wash your hands. Then he wiped his hands on the tops of his legs. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said quietly, now looking down at the cracked concrete of the patio below our feet. He paused and looked at me funny and quickly leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, and sat back. He stared at me with a look filled with fearful anticipation mixed with hope, his face slightly turned to his right and waited for my response.

I punched his lights out and went home.

Vincent lived two houses down from me on the same side of the street. I took my time as I headed home. I knew I would be in big trouble. My mind was a jumble of thoughts and feelings: What did I just do? He deserved it! Did I hurt him? Why did he do that? Oh my god! I’m in so much trouble! I stopped and sat on my front porch steps, my mind dancing between fury and tears. When I finally went in my mother was on the phone with Vincent’s mom and there was no doubt, by the look on her face, that she knew what I did, and she was pissed!

“Just a minute, Martha,” I heard her say as I was making my way - about half-way, in fact – up the stairs to my bedroom as quietly as possible when she yelled with that edge in her voice that made it clear she was angry: “William Daniel, come down here this instant!” She never called me William unless she was really angry and used William Daniel only when whatever I had done was on a par with a mortal sin. To a good Catholic, which she was, mortal sin meant going to hell and hell was what I was about to pay. “Come down here right now!”

When I heard both my names I grimaced and froze mid-step and nearly fell as my body couldn’t decide whether to finish stepping up or to turn around and obediently go down. As I reached the bottom step, I saw her standing there with both hands on her hips. She had set the phone’s handset next to the phone in the cubby the phone rested in. I could hear Mrs. Holtmeyer, Martha, still yelling at my mother.

“Do you want to tell me what went on with you and Vincent?” she asked. To any other listener, it sounded like an invitation to a fair and reasonable discussion. It was, in fact, the precursor to a prisoner-of-war interrogation.

“I…he…uh…we,” I stuttered, trying to find the right starting point.

“You blackened at least one of Vincent’s eyes, probably both and bloodied his nose is what you did,” she said sternly, not waiting for me to continue, her hands still firmly planted on her hips. “Why in God’s name would you do such a thing? To your best friend, for Christ’s sake!” she continued as she raised both arms in a gesture of bewilderment then letting them fall with a slap against her sides. It might be important to add that my complete realization of just how much trouble I was in came with that question. What she usually said any time she was exasperated was: “For Pete’s sake!” I was doomed. The only other time I had ever heard my mother bring God into an angry conversation was when my father brought home a brand-new pink and white 1963 Buick LeSabre without telling her – she reacted with the same divinely modified question. The subsequent ‘discussion’ with my dad, as she liked to refer to it, went on for nearly a week. I fully expected the same or worse – this was a divine double!

It didn’t help at all that she brought up the fact that Vincent was my best friend. I felt a queasiness starting in my stomach and a kind of regret somewhere in my mind that confused me.

Realizing I was in deep, deep trouble, I did the only thing I knew to do. I pulled out all the stops and told the truth. “He kissed me.”

She froze. Her hands, which had returned to her hips, now slowly reached up and gently rested near her mouth. “He what?” she haltingly asked, her face contorted somewhere between disbelief, shock, and disgust.

“Vincent kissed me,” I said, this time using his name, so it was totally clear to her what really happened. arms dropped again to her side. She looked like I told her Vincent had stabbed me with a knife.

“Where?!” she angrily threw at me, her doubt and disbelief evident in her hands returning to her hips as she leaned a bit forward.

“In his back yard,” I said.

Her face grew more agitated, so I thought she needed more detail, “on the swi…” She straightened up, hands still on her hips and then it suddenly dawned on me what she was asking. “Oh… Oh!” I exclaimed. I pointed to my cheek and the exact spot where Vincent’s lips had landed. “Right here. On my cheek.”

I have no idea what was running through her mind at this point or if she even heard Mrs. Holtmeyer’s voice still calling her name through the phone, but she picked up the phone, mumbled something that sounded like “I’ll call you back goodbye” and slowly hung up

She was speechless as she stood, her face morphing from confusion to disbelief to anger. “Why, that little queer,” she finally said after a long pause, using a word that I was only vaguely familiar with and, for me, had no homosexual connotations to it. My dad used it often for all kinds of people and my mother didn’t like him using it. I just figured it was a bad word that was an insult or put down. She had been ready to scold me for hitting Vincent and I was ready for the sentence I feared the most: “Just wait ‘til your father gets home!” But this new information thoroughly confounded her. The best she could muster was to send me to my room. “I wonder what your father will have to say about this!” she said out loud, mostly to herself, as I climbed the stairs. “Me too,” I whispered, that feeling of suddenly having to urinate rising in my bladder.

Vincent was never, by any stretch of the imagination, counted among the ‘normal’ kids by anyone, especially the normal kids. I was pretty awful at any sport I played, especially when it was on an organized team like Little League or Pee Wee Football, but Vincent made me look like Pete Rose or Jim Brown. He was often teased mercilessly and called ‘fairy’ more than a few times. That made me angry because everyone knew what a fairy was and Vincent was different in a lot of ways. But a fairy? No way. He was a “C” student whereas I got mostly “A’s” and an occasional “B”. So, it was a mystery to my parents and my older sister why in heaven’s name I had anything to do with him. They expressed that dismay regularly.

But Vincent had two things going for him that evidently didn’t matter to anyone else but me, and, I assume, his family. First, he was a creative Lake Mead held back by the Hoover Dam of his shyness, but, when the floodgates opened, out flowed the most beautiful piano playing – most of which were his own compositions – stunning artwork and wonderful stories that he could make up on the spot. The second thing was, well, embarrassing for me to admit and I dared not tell anyone what I thought: he was cute as a button. I just liked being with him. And that, for some unknown reason, didn’t seem strange to me. It would take a few more years, and a few more kisses, to fully understand why.

As I laid on my bed waiting for the inevitable inquisition to begin as soon as my father arrived home from work, I thought about the reasons I maintained my friendship with Vincent and why I kept them to myself. It was simple. I was thirteen and thirteen-year-old boys don’t think their best friends are cute. But I did think that sometimes. Besides thinking he was cute, I really liked him. I mean really, really liked him. I couldn’t wait to see him every day at school. He always smiled when he saw me coming and hurried to greet me. I thought about him a lot at night in bed or when he was away for a few days with his family. I thought that’s what best friends do. At the same time, I was utterly aware of what people, especially my parents and my other friends – and their parents – might mistakenly think about that. Would I be thought of as a fairy, also? All at once I felt very much alone. How could something that I thought and felt about someone else suddenly appear so awful? Maybe I knew, down deep inside, that it was awful. And what if word about what Vincent did get around at school? “Hey Will, anymore fairies kiss you lately?” “Hey Will, did you like it and kiss him back?” “Hey Will, wanna play with my sister’s dolls?” That had to be why I decked him, I thought, trying to rationalize it. But it was a square peg in a round hole. I hated myself for doing it. And not just because I hurt him. I hurt him because he scared me.

A couple of days after all that happened, I asked my mother if she heard how Vincent was doing. It was as if I had asked her if she was a communist. “Never you mind!” she said in a stern andthreatening tone. “Your father and his father have taken care of things.”

“What do you mean? Taken care of things? Is he really hurt? He’s my friend! I should have the right to know!”

“Not anymore. He took care of that! And you did the right thing. Go back upstairs and read or something.”

It was just a stupid kiss and I overreacted, I thought, as I laid on my bed. He shouldn’t have done it, and I shouldn’t have done it. Big deal! Or was it? They seem to think so. I was so confused. I cried.

Vincent did not show up for school for the rest of that week. When he returned the next week things had changed. Vincent and I were always seated one in front of the other. But on the Monday morning after Vincent’s kiss, I was met with instructions to gather my things from my desk in front of where Vincent sat and move all the way over to the other side of the room. Vincent arrived after I had moved my things. He went directly to his usual seat, not even reacting to the fact that somebody other than me was now sitting in front of him. A week later Vincent was gone. I was told he transferred to the public school.

I saw him only twice after that year of my first kiss – Vincent’s kiss. The first time was shortly after school was out for the summer. I was in my backyard playing catch with Marty, my new best friend. Marty started to throw the ball to me but stopped mid-throw. I was standing with my back to Vincent’s yard when Marty pointed excitedly, his eyes wide, over my shoulder as if he had seen Bigfoot appearing in the old man’s, overgrown backyard in the yard past Vincent’s. I turned to look over my shoulder at about the exact same time as Vincent looked up from the comic book he was reading as he walked toward the very swing where the ‘incident’ as my mother now called it occurred. I started to completely turn and, at the same time, raised my hand to wave hello, but Vincent froze for a second then turned suddenly and went back into the house. I had gotten over the shock of that first kiss and started, slowly anyway, to think about why he did what he did and what he was thinking. I would lay awake most nights in bed wondering about it and I would feel this very gentle ache down in that space between my stomach and my heart. It didn’t really hurt. Not physically anyway. It was deeper. At first, I felt betrayed. Why would he do that knowing it risked everything including our very friendship? What made him think it was ok? And that I would think it was ok? But I started remembering more details about that day – that kiss – that were not obvious to me due to the immediate anger I felt when he did it. That kiss was not quick and hard like you give your least favorite Aunt. It was gentle and purposeful like it had meaning I was supposed to understand. A meaning that words would not have adequately expressed. It was longer than I had remembered. I guess lingered is a better word. I slowly started to realize that maybe Vincent’s kiss was trying to tell me something that I did not understand. Something that he already knew about himself.

The last time I saw Vincent was just a few days before the start of school at the end of the summer. I had gone out to sit on the steps of the front porch after my mother announced, with some sarcastic relief in her voice, that a moving van was parked in front of the house two doors down. Vincent’s house. I watched as the men, all dressed in the same dark green uniforms, carried the big and small boxes out of Vincent’s house, and set them inside the big truck. Two other men arranged them inside the truck. After a short time watching I was almost ready to go back inside when I saw Vincent’s mom and dad come outside and head toward their car. If they noticed me, they didn’t let on. I heard his mother yell “Vincent! Come on!” and he slowly walked out of the house. He paused on his front steps, and I’m pretty sure looked to see if I was outside anywhere. His dad then yelled for him to hurry up and get in the car. He walked around the back of the car and got in the side closest to me. I heard his parents raise their voices at him but couldn’t make out what it was. Vincent slumped back in the seat and, making sure his parents weren’t looking, looked over in my direction. I can’t say for sure if it was sadness I saw on his face, but it sure looked like it. I thought about waving, just to show that everything was ok, but instead, I reached up and pointed to the cheek that he had kissed, motioned blowing a kiss, pointed at my chest then pointed at him. He looked puzzled from what I could tell as the car started to back out of the driveway but just before his face disappeared from view, a slowly growing smile filled his face, and he sat back. I could swear I saw his mouth move saying “nothing” to something one of his parents must have said. I got up and went inside. My mom asked if they were finally gone and all I said was “Yeah, they’re gone.” But I said to myself “not really” and my own journey began.